Jewish Family Services Edmonton has been working in the city for more than half a century, helping people through social, economic, mental and emotional adversity. The organization’s foundation is Jewish and its services are open to everyone. It runs counselling through the Edmonton Healing Centre, settlement and wayfinding support for newcomers, outreach and case management for older adults, home support, and a program for survivors of Nazi persecution funded through the Claims Conference.
The organization describes its work through the Jewish phrase tikun olam, to heal the world. That shows up in how services are paid for as well as how they are delivered. At the Edmonton Healing Centre, every counselling session booked at the standard rate helps fund a low-cost or no-cost session for someone who could not otherwise afford one.
Each of those programs answers to a different funder, and each funder asks for different information. JFSE collects a lot of it. Intake records, case notes and surveys are customized program by program, and several of those customizations exist because a particular funding agreement requires a particular answer.
Alyona Lanyme is the Systems Administrator who looks after all of it. She joined JFSE in 2017 and is responsible for the organization’s systems and digital infrastructure, which now includes Sumac Case Management. She configures it, reports out of it, and supports the case managers and social workers who work in it. She knows the program, in her words, “inside out.”
Asked how likely she would be to recommend Sumac to another organization, Lanyme scored it a 10.
[QUOTE PLACEHOLDER — Lanyme on why she scored Sumac a 10 / to be sourced from call recording and approved]
Reporting
Reporting is the part of the system Lanyme works with most, and the part she rates highest. Anything staff enter into Sumac can be reported on, so a funder’s question about who a program served, or how many people it served, is answered from data the organization already holds. Nobody has to go back to the case managers and re-collect it. Intake records, case notes and survey responses sit in the same system, so the reports come out of the records staff are already working in.
When a built-in report does not cover a particular question, she exports the data to Excel and does the rest of the analysis there. An unusual request from a funder becomes a spreadsheet problem rather than a software request.
[QUOTE PLACEHOLDER — Lanyme on reporting flexibility and exporting to Excel / to be sourced from call recording and approved]
Configuration
The second thing Lanyme singles out is how much of the system she can change herself. Editing the wording of a survey question, for example, is something she does directly, without opening a support ticket and waiting for a reply. For an administrator supporting several programs at once, she called that “very helpful.”
Requests of that kind come up regularly, because programs and funder requirements change. Handling them in-house also means the person making the edit is the person who already knows what the program needs the question to say.
Custom Data Collection
JFSE’s records carry a large number of custom fields, and the organization runs several forms and surveys rather than one standard intake. That depth is deliberate. An agency running counselling, newcomer support, older adult outreach and home support under separate funding agreements cannot report on all of them from a single generic form. Surveys are the main mechanism for the program-specific questions, and Lanyme builds and maintains those herself.
[QUOTE PLACEHOLDER — Lanyme on the range of funder-driven data JFSE has to collect / to be sourced from call recording and approved]
Day-to-Day Use
JFSE moved onto Sumac in 2025, building a new database rather than carrying an older structure across.
Case managers and social workers reach their records through Case Portal, the browser-based side of Sumac. Staff who work in it have told Lanyme they find the interface straightforward to move around in.
[QUOTE PLACEHOLDER — Lanyme relaying case-manager feedback on Case Portal / to be sourced from call recording and approved]
Lanyme also passes feedback from those staff back to Sumac’s product team, which is how the conversation behind this story started.
